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Harper's team dumps city-friendly candidate

By Susan DelacourtOttawa Bureau

Thu., Nov. 1, 2007

OTTAWA – The federal Conservatives have ousted their candidate for Toronto Centre, 43-year-old international-trade lawyer Mark Warner, and he says it's because he wanted to play up urban and social issues that are at odds with the master Conservative campaign strategy.

"We've had, for a number of months, a series of differences between our campaign and the national campaign, over the degree to which I could run a campaign that would focus on the kind of issues that matter in a downtown urban riding," Warner told the Star.

Conservative officials have been actively resisting Warner's emphasis on housing, health care and cities issues, he said, even blocking him from participating in a Star forum on poverty earlier this year and pointedly removing from his campaign literature a reference to the 2006 international conference on AIDS in Toronto – which Warner attended but Prime Minister Stephen Harper did not.

Don Plett, Conservative party president, signed the letter that was delivered to Warner this week precisely as the government was unveiling its mini-budget on Tuesday afternoon.

Plett said yesterday he didn't want to elaborate on the decision to oust Warner, for privacy reasons. However, Plett didn't argue with Warner's characterization of the dispute.

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"Well let me just simply say this; that in a national campaign, that is exactly what it is – a national campaign. There are certain things that we expect all of our candidates to do in a national campaign," Plett told the Star yesterday.

"You're telling me Mr. Warner has admitted himself that he wasn't prepared to go along with that, then I think he's answered his own question. But I'm not suggesting that. I'm simply saying that we can't discuss the reasons why. If Mr. Warner says that is the reason, then he's, I guess, telling everybody `I wasn't prepared to go along with the rules.'"

Another candidate, Brent Barr, in Guelph, has also been disallowed from running, Plett said.

Barr, like Warner, is shocked and angry – furious at being told he wasn't campaigning enough and, more importantly, that he was failing to enter information from his canvassing into the central party information registry.

"The Conservative party that I'm from doesn't remove a duly nominated candidate. It's supposed to be based on grassroots principles," Barr said.

In Toronto Centre, where Warner has been campaigning hard since being acclaimed as the Conservative candidate in February, his supporters are stunned – and so are the rival candidates who had thought they'd be facing off with him on the ballot.

Bob Rae, former premier and leadership candidate, is the Liberal candidate for the riding, vying to keep the seat for the party after the resignation of Bill Graham in June.

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Rae said yesterday he had come to know Warner from a series of public meetings in the riding – he even singled him out to the crowd at the Star poverty forum in May. Rae called Warner "a very fine, public-spirited person" and said "to me, this is just a clear indication of just how controlling and how authoritarian, frankly, the management of the Conservative party is."

Warner, in a press release last night, noted he had been a Conservative since the 1980s, attracted by former prime minister Brian Mulroney's fight against apartheid in South Africa. Warner says in the press release that Harper's version of the Conservative party "cynically pays `lip service' to diversity."

Warner is hinting that he may now consider voting for Rae, though he's still reeling too much from the ouster to make any promises.

"The event is too recent. My beliefs have not changed, but my party has. That said, I think Bob Rae is a decent man, and I have great respect for him."

Connie Harrison, a poverty and housing activist in the St. Jamestown area of Toronto Centre, and a candidate in the 2006 municipal election, says she can't believe the Conservatives would want to close the door to a candidate like Warner.

"They want to prove that they are not scary. It's behaviour like this that tells the rest of us, yes they are," Harrison said in an interview yesterday.

She finds it odd that for all the Tories' talk of outreach to ethnic and cultural communities, they have ousted a black man, born in Trinidad and Tobago, who immigrated to Canada as child in the 1960s and went on to attend Osgoode Hall law school and have a significant career in international trade law.

"I don't want to use this word, but I think there was some discrimination involved," Harrison said.

Plett categorically rejected that suggestion, saying he didn't even know that Warner was black or originally from Trinidad.

"That certainly didn't play into it. His colour was not discussed on either of the calls and the questioning that I did ... that wasn't ever raised, and it certainly was not raised in the national council decision," Plett said.

"I can say that is the furthest thing from the truth because we have ethnics, we have many ethnic people running for our party in different parts of our country. ... We very much want the immigrant population, the ethnic population in our country to support us as we support them."

Harrison said she doesn't normally tilt toward the Conservative party or its candidates, but Warner "wasn't your typical candidate. I think he wanted to stress the urban issues. I think he actually wanted to reach out to communities that hadn't been reached out to before."

Harry Renaud, a former chief financial officer for the Montreal Expos and also a general manager at B.C. Place stadium, is now retired and living in Toronto Centre. He had signed on to be Warner's campaign manager but eventually gave up when he realized that it was going to be a long, drawn-out war with the central Conservative campaign.

Renaud echoed Warner's tales of being warned away from urban issues and social concerns.

He said he often found the Conservatives' central campaign material to be too "vanilla" – out of step with the concerns of Toronto.

"Bigger picture, I think they've written off Toronto," Renaud said. "I think they feel that the Prime Minister is working hard on Quebec and whatever he's going to lose in the GTA, he can get in the West and therefore, he can carve the GTA out and say to hell with you, I'm going in a different direction. ... This is definitely a Liberal lock-hold and if you're in the middle of it, as we are, dead centre, and trying to scream for help, you're a sacrificial lamb."

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